Editorial

by Jon Fairall

^{Nuclear Heaven}

I think we can all agree with the Prime Minister that nuclear energy is, in principal, a Good Idea. Forget all this nonsense about the environmental costs of mining uranium - or the CO² produced thereby. We can all go on, exactly as before, wasting electricity all over the place, and we don't need to create CO² to do it.

It's much better than coal. It's always a lot of fun, however, when Geography comes along and slaps the Great and the Good on both cheeks. In this particular instance, John Howard's dilemma is that while polling conducted by Newspoll in December 2006 put support for nuclear power at 35 per cent; the figure drops to only 25 per cent when the power plant is sited locally.

The rule seems to be that, suggest a specific location for a power plant, and enthusiasm will fall off in inverse proportion to the distance between the location of the voter and the power station.

Well, that's a great political problem. I started to think about it when I read a report prepared for the Australia Institute by its deputy director, Andrew Macintosh, called Siting Nuclear Power Plants in Australia... Where would they go?

Visit www.tai.org.au/documents/ downloads/WP96.pdf for the full text.

'In Australia, half of the population opposes nuclear energy and two thirds say they would oppose a nuclear power plant in their local area', the report says. 'Given this, in order for there to be a thorough and full-blooded debate about nuclear energy, it is necessary to identify the sites that are best suited to nuclear power plants.'

The report goes on to identify Port Augusta as the 'most logical' site for a nuclear power plant in south eastern Australia.

'A nuclear power plant at Port Augusta could provide electricity to surrounding mines and other industry. There is also a possibility it could be co-located with a desalinisation plant that would provide an additional source of freshwater for the Adelaide region,' Macintosh later claimed.

So who else's backyard is suitable for a nuclear power plant? Siting Nuclear Power Plants in Australia identified the following criteria:

Proximity to a major water source (almost inevitably the sea) for cooling; Proximity to appropriate existing electricity infrastructure;

Proximity to transport infrastructure to facilitate the movement of nuclear fuel, waste and other relevant materials; and Proximity to major electricity load centres.

The first of these is necessary on technical grounds. Water is necessary - no water, no nukes. Some power plants work by heating water, which is then used to drive turbines, which in turn drive generators. Even if this is not the case, water is required for cooling.

The remainder are economic constraints. They could be violated, but there would be a significant cost penalty associated with breaking them.

Place the generator too far from the load, and most of the energy generated is actually lost in overcomming electrical resistance in the transmission wires. Place it too far from transportation routes, and you have to add the cost of road or rail construction to the cost of building the plant.

There are other criteria too. One could loosely describe them as political. One would want minimum population density. Areas that are sparsely populated pose minimum health risk and obviously provide less people for protest meetings.

Geological stability is important. One can build nuclear plants in earthquake prone regions, as the Japanese do, but this problem can only be solved by increasingly expensive engineering.

Security, and the ecology of the region, also need to be taken into account.

So, plug all the constraints into a GIS, and what pops out? In Queensland: Townsville; Mackay; Rockhampton; Gladstone; Bundaberg - near Yeppoon, Emu Park or Keppel Sands; the Sunshine Coast - near Maroochydore, Coolum or Noosa; and the Bribie Island area.

In New South Wales, you don't want to live in Port Stephens - near Nelson Bay; on the Central Coast - near Tuggerah Lakes; around Botany Bay; Port Kembla; Jervis Bay or Sussex Inlet.

You definitely don't want to move to Jervis Bay.

In Victoria, the spots that count are South Gippsland - near Yarram, Woodside, or Seaspray; Westernport - near Hastings, French Island, Koo Wee Rup, or Coronet Bay; and Port Phillip Bay- around Newport, Avalon, Werribee; and Portland.

In South Australia, it's the coastal area near Mount Gambier and Millicent; Port Adelaide; Port Pirie and - best of all - Port Augusta.

Of course, the desirability of sites changes as you change the weighting given to the various constraints. If political reality is taken into account, then the number one constraint on nuclear energy is local opposition. In fact, the political reality of local opposition dominates all other constraints. If that is the case, then a map of the desirability of sites for nuclear power plants is just the inverse of the map of population distribution.

Such a solution would keep the politicians happy; it may even be necessary to sell the idea. The problem is that all those other engineering constraints can only be broken by throwing money at the problem.

The lesson to be learned from the analysis is that it can be made acceptable to build nuclear power stations in Australia. But we should be very careful of the economic analysis. The Switowski report suggests that electricity prices would have to double to make nukes economic.

I doubt it. Nuclear electricity in Australia will be very, very expensive. That's why it's not going to happen. The tyranny of distance strikes again.

Jon Fairall is the editor of Position

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(This page last modified on 5 April 2007)